The Wars of Peace: The Mundane Violence of the Victorians

conference

Fri, May 3, 2019,
09:00 AM –
06:00 PM
Martin E. Segal Theatre

Wheelchair Accessibility

Cover of Mildred's Cross by William Stephens Hayward, 1880. Public domain.

About the conference

Join us for the 2019 Victorian Studies Conference "The Wars of Peace: The Mundane Violence of the Victorians." The title is taken from Kipling’s White Man’s Burden, and both the source and the word we have cut, ‘savage,’ hangs over the whole conference. The unspoken idea of savagery, which Kipling meant to define the targets of British colonial despoilment, can of course speak to British policies and military actions, but also to the daily experience of bodily pain felt by so many Victorians, victims of domestic violence, substandard living conditions, untreated illnesses. Yet the spectacular claims of the word ‘savage’ can make us expect to see violence as a spectacle. Instead, this conference wants to see violence as the everyday way of life in the 19th century: the wars that constituted 19th century peacetime, the daily wars at home and the endless wars abroad.

Cosponsored by the Victorian Committee of the PhD Program in English at the CUNY Graduate Center, Dickens Studies Annual, the PhD Program in English, the Advanced Research Collaborative, and the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center, CUNY.